In wireless communication technologies may use a Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)/Collision Avoidance (CA) scheme for avoiding colliding usage of a wireless medium. In a CSMA scheme, a node will determine if the wireless medium is idle or currently occupied by transmission activity of another node. If the wireless medium is occupied, the node may defer its own transmission activity on the wireless medium until the node senses that the wireless medium is idle. The latter type of operation is also referred to as a Listen Before Talk (LBT) procedure. When the node decides to perform a transmission on the wireless medium, it can try to detect a collision during the ongoing transmission and decide to stop the ongoing transmission. In this way, a CSMA/CA scheme can be used for managing shared usage of the wireless medium in a distributed manner.
In wireless communication networks, communication between two nodes is typically implemented as half-duplex communication. In the case of half-duplex communication, only one of the nodes can transmit at a time on a given carrier frequency. A further option, which may offer more efficient utilization of available radio resources, is to use bidirectional full duplex (BFD) communication, in which both nodes can simultaneously transmit and received on the same carrier frequency. This is typically accomplished by using self interference (SI) cancellation techniques.
However, in the case of conventional CSMA/CA schemes it may be problematic to benefit from improved resource efficiency offered by BFD communication, e.g., as observed in “Does Full-Duplex Double the Capacity of Wireless Networks?” by X. Xie et al., IEEE INFOCOM 2014—IEEE Conference on Computer Communications, Apr. 27-May 2, 2014, Toronto, Canada, or in “Medium Access Control Design for Full Duplex Wireless Systems: Challenges and Approaches” by K. M. Thilina, et al., IEEE Communications Magazine, May 2015.
Accordingly, there is a need for techniques which allow for efficient control of radio transmissions on a bidirectional full duplex radio link.